Margaret Sutermeister (1875–1950) was an American photographer active in Massachusetts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Biography

Margaret "Daisy" Sutermeister was born in 1875 in

Milton, Massachusetts Milton is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States and an affluent suburb of Boston. The population was 28,630 at the 2020 census. Milton is the birthplace of former U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and architect Buckminster Fuller. ...

, to Emmanuel Sutermeister and Harriet Georgianna Davenport. Her father, who was of Swiss descent, ran a commercial

plant nursery A nursery is a place where plants are propagated and grown to a desired size. Mostly the plants concerned are for gardening, forestry or conservation biology, rather than agriculture. They include retail nurseries, which sell to the general p ...

and vegetable garden and was also a fireman. Her brother was chemist Edwin Sutermeister. She lived for most of her life in the Capen-Davenport-Sutermeister House on Canton Avenue, which had been built in 1781 and was located on the same property as the family nursery. After leaving school in 1894, Sutermeister took up photography using a glass plate camera to document everyday life in Milton and the surrounding area. Over the next 15 years, she shot a wide range of subjects: romantic landscapes, lively street scenes, scientific experiments, and portraits both formal and candid. Among the people she photographed are middle-class whites, African Americans,

Gypsy The Romani (also spelled Romany or Rromani , ), colloquially known as the Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally nomadic itinerants. They live in Europe and Anatolia, and have diaspora populations located worldwide, with sign ...

vendors, farmhands, and Asian laundrymen. When her father died in 1909, she took over managing the family's Davenport Nursery and gave up photography. She died in 1951, and a year later the new owners of her house discovered her 1800 glass-plate negatives in a barn. They donated this archive of turn-of-the-century Massachusetts life to the Milton Historical Society. It was published in the early 1990s by art historian Judith Bookbinder and has formed the basis of a number of exhibitions since. Ten of Sutermeister's photographs are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sutermeister, Margaret 1875 births 1950 deaths People from Milton, Massachusetts 19th-century American photographers 20th-century American photographers 20th-century American women photographers 19th-century American women photographers